CRIMINAL LAW — prosecution — work health and safety — duty of persons undertaking business — risk of death or serious injury
SENTENCE — objective seriousness — mitigating factors — aggravating factors — plea of guilty — general deterrence — specific deterrence — capacity to pay appropriate penalty
COSTS — prosecution costs — defence costs
OTHER — person struck by moving plant — person walking on walkway struck by a reversing reach stacker — failure to conduct adequate risk assessment — failure to develop, implement, and enforce a traffic management plan
Quick Take
1Objective seriousness of a WHS offence is assessed by an overall evaluation of the foreseeability and known nature of the risk, the potential consequences, the availability and burden of risk-mitigation steps, and the duration and systemic nature of the failures, following [name withheld] v Silver City Drilling — here assessed as high range where the risk was known, the consequences obvious, and the mitigation steps were straightforward and promptly implemented after the fatality.
2A corporation's culpability for systemic failures in creating unsafe conditions over a prolonged period is of a substantially greater order than the culpability of an individual employee whose momentary lapse contributed to the incident.
3Where a prosecutor fails to comply with a subpoena to produce, the defendant is entitled to its costs of obtaining compliance, and the prosecutor is disentitled from recovering its own costs on that issue.
